How nutty is the Daily Kos blog? Nutty enough to make an outraged defense of North Korea? Yes. On Wednesday afternoon, Niccolo Caldararo  an adjunct professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University  complained The Western media wallows in the exotic and North Korea has been the clown of the 20th century, brought forward for comic relief now and then or pasted up as a paper tiger, to scare voters before elections or as a distraction for other important news. (Snip) While North Korea may behave in a strange fashion at times, its political history is no less

I was flipping through the radio channels and got to NPR nightly business show. They had some comments from listeners and one airhead from I believe Seattle talked about how we should not wish for North Korea to change because there are several endangered species indigenous to North Korea that might become extinct if North Korea started to develop economically.

While North Korea may behave in a strange fashion at times, its political history is no less responsible toward its own citizens than the history of the South [Koreans], especially the recent history that was dominated in the 1960s to 1980s by dictatorial regimes that practiced torture and mass arrest. While we hear of starvation and torture in North Korea, these are far less well documented than the recent history of the South.

Yet the South progressed economically at a rapid pace despite its dictators.

I love the part about atrocities being better documented in the South than the North (which is no doubt true). Apparently the prof doesn't understand that nothing except what the regime wants ever gets documented in the North.

Apparently he thinks there are concentration camps in South Korea. Then again, since these are officially "re-education camps" where people are re-indoctrinated in communist ideology, perhaps he thinks South Korea is worse than North Korea specifically because the South doesn't have such camps.

Now if they used electric consumption as a measure, the North would fall far short. But those who are still defending the “pure” Communism of North Korea, will not be swayed by such materialistic standards.

Well, without electricy in abundant quantities, industrial doesn’t go anywhere. Virtually all the industrial production of North Korea is entirely in support of its military complex. The agricultural production is given very short shrift, still working with the main source of power being either the personal effort of the peasants, or feeble attempts to utilize animals as beasts of burden.

Vast numbers of people have literally starved to death in North Korea since 1950. And the situation has never improved.

Here’s a little gedankenexperiment for adjunct Professor Caldararo: remove all the barriers, mines, fortifications and the like at the 38th parallel DMZ, and allow unimpeded migration across the border in either direction, and let me know which way the population would flow.

Here’s a couple of hints for Mr. Adjunct Prof - an early version of that experiment was carried out in Berlin a couple of decades ago; a crude form of it is occurring now at the border between Korea and China.

Leftist academicians (usually redundant) so believe in the dream of a socialist eden, many of them cannot bring themselves to recognize the obvious fact that all totally socialist states have been hells on earth. The record of N. Korea has been one of the most monstrous disasters in human history. But the professor refuses to admit the obvious.

Ah, but our intrepid Kossack has an explanation for that! You see, dark North Korea at night is just like Marin County next door to glowy San Francisco:

Marin is comparatively dark at night...because environmentalists fought to save its farmland and created vast parks.

And there you have it, comrades! North Korea is just a big pristine old-growth forest! Ecologically speaking they're far ahead of us! (Except that there are no forests at all in North Korea, the inhabitants having chopped them all down for firewood.)

Mendacity on a Walter Duranty scale.

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posted on 12/22/2011 4:48:44 PM PST
by denydenydeny
(The more a system is all about equality in theory the more it's an aristocracy in practice.)

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